The Archaeological Model I: Identifying Discursive Formations

Abstract

Having reviewed where The Archaeology of Knowledge identifies friends and foes, we can turn to Foucault’s own proposals on how the history of science might be written. Foucault’s own, archaeological, model is most naturally reconstructed in two steps. I shall begin by introducing the main conceptual tools that Foucault employs for analyzing what he terms “discursive formations” and “statements”. These notions will be related to the methodology of serial history, and sharpened by drawing on some basic notions from analytical philosophy. It is only subsequently that we can take up the Gretchenfrage for any philosophy or history of science, to wit, the question how continuities and discontinuities are conceptualized and accounted for. I hope to show that the archaeological model contains suggestions for describing change in science that are still of systematic interest today.